The invention relates to methods for configuring an electrical system, particularly the configuration of building and plant installations or the configuration of a European Installation Bus (EIB), whereby systems are configured simultaneously in various representations, e.g. in a Continuous Function Chart (CFC) and in a human-machine interface such as the WinCC® operator control and visualization tool. Continuous Function Charts or CFCs are frequently used for planning automation tasks, e.g. for the planning of Simatic controls.
At the same time, the human-machine interfaces for an automation task, e.g. the planning of a Simatic control, are also frequently configured and modified simultaneously or in step with the preparation of the CFC. For example, a visualization possibility of this kind for a Simatic control has been described using the WinCC® program.
To navigate in the engineering data, a configuration engineer generally has to familiarize himself with the individual navigation functions of every single application. For example, to search for linked data in several engineering tools, the configuration engineer has to navigate simultaneously in all the tools involved. Sideways navigation along the linked data between the tools requires considerable operator effort and knowledge of the relevant filing schemes, whereas locating and filing engineering data requires knowledge of the industry- or project-specific conventions. Applying the conventions involves a certain amount of familiarization effort and requires a degree of care and is therefore time-intensive. The data has until now been filed on an application-specific basis and can only be located by interactive operator input in the application itself. The current engineering data is not linked to any documentation of the system to be configured, resulting in increased documentation maintenance after any modification of the engineering data. Present day engineering tools support the configuration engineer in filing the engineering data in accordance with conventions, subject to the limitation that the data must be filed hierarchically. This prevents any cross-linking of the data in the filing schemes or any inter-applicational data filing. The engineering data in the plant documentation is usually only a copy of the actual data, which means that the document must be laboriously updated manually after each modification.
As described on page 20 of the Siemens ITIution White Paper entitled “Informations-technologie in der Automatisierungstechnik” (Information Technology in Automation Engineering), April 1999, for uniform navigation to all the information, an appropriate layout as a web site with individual pages networked via hyperlinks is required, the hierarchical component structure of the plant defining a structure for the web site. This document also suggests that greater flexibility and easier modifiability can be achieved by a strict separation of structure and user data.